Phase three began when the subterranean nation stopped feeding bodies into the grinder and started moving commanders where they could hurt people.
The ambush hit JFK's team in C2 from two directions at once, with one armored general rising behind them from the dirt so quietly that the air changed before anyone turned. Ahead of them, three more commanders crossed in from B1, stalking through the ruined grass with the solemn confidence of judges entering a courtroom.
FDR keyed into the comms. "JFK. Do you require assistance. I can send a fleet to your coordinates right now."
Boxed between four commanders, JFK sounded as if FDR had asked about weather. "No need. We can handle this."
"Warrex. Eisenhower. Grant. Take the one behind us. Get him out of my sight and herd him into Grant's containment frame."
"Are you sure you can take three generals at once?" Warrex asked.
"No," JFK replied. "I could take twenty generals at once."
"What on earth did Evarran do to you people?" Warrex asked.
JFK's answer came through the runic blade sliding from his forearm, narrow and pen-shaped, made for precision rather than impact. With one sweep, he wrote glowing symbols into the air, and each stroke sank into empty space as if the battlefield had become paper.
"How exactly are you accomplishing that?" Lynder demanded over the comms from the distant border. "You are using runic arts to literally write more runic arts."
Over Lynder's complaint, the final stroke sank into the air, and JFK lowered his arm.
Laughter rolled out from one of the commanders as the three of them slowed near the glowing script. "You plan to trap us with that?"
"Oh no," JFK said. "I want to test something."
A shiver passed through the air before jagged rows of light punched up around the commanders and the troops behind them. Once the field finished forming, forward motion had a price: halt at the edge of JFK's construct or push through upright blades sharp enough to turn a charge into ribbons.
Smiles remained on the generals' faces until JFK changed languages. In his forgotten tongue, two words entered the cold air. "Ask Not."
Pride went out of them all at once. Tension stayed in their bodies while every thought behind their eyes narrowed toward JFK, leaving the battlefield around him as background noise.
Into that narrowed attention came JFK's command voice. "You stand at the edge of history. Greatness belongs to the hand bold enough to take it." The commanders waited, hungry for purpose. "Ask not what you can do for your kingdom. Ask what you can do… for me."
First came a step, then the pull of purpose dragged all three commanders forward. Pride twisted into need, need became speed, and within seconds they were running with their troops behind them, driving straight into the blades as though JFK stood beyond them with the only answer left in the world.
Once the charge reached the light, armor and flesh tore together, and the front ranks unraveled into strips of meat and scattered glow. Momentum kept feeding bodies into the blades from behind, so the slaughter continued by pressure alone, each line forcing the next into the same bright ruin. Through all of it, JFK remained still at the edge of his own construct, letting the field do the work.
Warrex had the ambushing general behind JFK, and survival came down to ugly inches. Each blow that reached his guard drove pain through his arms and forced his heels deeper into the dirt, while Grant and Eisenhower kept shaving danger away from him with machine precision, turning the beast step by step toward Grant's containment frame.
A drone feed carried JFK's showcase into C3 while Roy advanced through the ash corridors Truman had burned across the grass, every blackened lane removing another place where an ambush could hide.
When the compulsion took hold, Roy's first instinct was publicity. The AllPhone came up long enough for a fast hair check before he keyed his earpiece. "Serenity. Drone. Now."
The camera drone dropped to eye level, and Roy gave it the angle he wanted with the smoldering battlefield behind him. Truman and FDR remained at his back, two Super Elites in frame before he said a word.
"Ah. Yes." Roy let the distant flashes of JFK's construct burn behind him. "One of my stupendous Super Elites has blessed us with a show, just a tiny taste of his extraordinary capabilities." His voice softened for the lens. "Resistance to his word appears to be theoretical at best."
Roy smoothed his jacket as the devastation flickered behind him. "And the last of my present Super Elites, what kind of show will he have for you?" His grin found the camera. "You will find out soon, but you have to keep watching."
Once Serenity cut the feed, Roy kept moving and tapped his chest toward Truman like he had just spent personal currency. "I hyped you up. You better have a grand showcase next."
"I do have something I have been working on," Truman said. "I have enjoyed fission magic so much that I have not had the chance to use it properly yet. During the first part of phase three, I shall put on a show."
In B4, the lower-caste barracks came apart under Eryndra's advance, slum walls collapsing into rubble while silence spread behind her in a scar wide enough to be seen from the feeds.
"Hold your position," JFK ordered over the comms. "Do not press deeper yet. I do not want anything spilling behind you through the path you just carved."
"Got it," Eryndra answered while B4 kept breaking around her.
"Everyone else needs to hurry up."
"I believe I have held the line sufficiently," Zehrina announced from C1. "I am pushing forward."
"Go ahead," JFK said. "Slow down when you reach B1."
By the time JFK finished speaking, Zehrina had already left the order behind. Noise obeyed its own timing on this floor, with echoes slipping through the cavern ahead of the impacts that made them. As the squads pushed into the B sectors, that warped rhythm moved through the enemy first, and several surviving commanders stopped mid-advance, turning toward the center of the field while their aggression tightened into rigid stillness.
Whatever had entered the battle carried a weight the ordinary horde and its generals had never produced. The change in ambient magic reached Lynder at the border. "Permission to move forward," he said. "I am sensing energies that do not belong on this battlefield."
"That should be fine," Roy answered. "The Convention is holding. Anything left out there should be delayed long enough for us to fall back if necessary."
False Void magic carried Lynder over the cavern in a dark stream, and below him a lone general dragged bloody runes through the dirt, building a circle aimed straight at Roy's advancing team.
By the time the circle began to glow, Lynder dropped between the monster and its target, and a layered burst of False Void fire swallowed the general where it stood. Charred flesh hit the grass a moment later.
Echoes of False Void magic still pulsed around Lynder's hands when he landed beside the fallen general and nudged the creature's ruined face with the toe of his boot. "Speak, creature. What were you calling?"
The creature's mouth began to open when explosions tore through the distance in a marching line, each blast consuming another runic drone until a whole stretch of the defense vanished in fire.
At Lynder's feet, a bloody hand pressed into the dirt and closed the final break in the runic circle.
Anti-magic crashed over the circle from Lynder's outstretched hand, breaking the glow into sparks that scattered across the dirt. "Did you think I missed that?"
The dying general laughed through a rattling breath. "The Sixth... Witch."
The real explosion came from beneath Lynder's feet and hurled him backward across the field. Shadow magic bloomed behind him before the ground could take him, dense enough to catch his momentum and dump him hard into the grass near Roy.
Grass tore under Lynder's hands as he pushed himself upright, eyes on the smoldering distance. "It looks like that guy was telling the truth after all. An ancient group stands before us."
From the distant ruins rose a pillar of black mana threaded with blue and yellow light, and the Sixth Witch climbed through it until she hung above the battlefield. Darkness folded around her as a robe, with branching patterns hovering just above the fabric, while her wide hat carried a small crown instead of a pointed peak and a heavy brim that fell all the way to her lower back. Fury held her in the air as much as magic.
The hovering entity drew Roy's gaze upward, and he tilted his head, taking in the full picture with the disappointment of a man whose expectations had not quite been met. "I was really hoping she had a traditional witch hat," he muttered, reaching up to adjust his collar against the cold air rolling in off the field. "I will be honest with you, because this is a relative of the Imm—" The word died somewhere between his lungs and his lips, half a syllable too late. Mentioning the Immortal Family on a live feed was exactly the kind of mistake that ended careers, or worse, and the silence that followed was the particular kind that demanded filling.
Lynder filled it, completely misreading the reason for the pause. "Indeed. A relative of the dreaded Immortal Family. Though, throughout her long life she maintained no affiliation with them whatsoever."
"Well, look at that," Roy remarked, his voice thick with sarcastic melodrama. "That is precisely the thought I was having."
Already, though, something further out across the field had pulled Lynder's attention away, drawn it toward the burning wreckage at the edge of visibility, and whatever color had remained in his face was quietly leaving it. A beast emerged first through the smoke, massive and black, its hide traced with distinct gold markings while heavy ornaments caught what little light remained. Not far from it, a towering figure stood wrapped entirely in ragged layered cloth, hooded and perfectly still, its silhouette too tall and too motionless to read.
"I know what you are thinking." Lutrian's voice, when he appeared at Lynder's shoulder, carried the carefully measured quality of a man talking himself down from a ledge. "But we do not know this for certain. Perhaps it is just a terrible coincidence that these specific three are here together."
"You are being willfully ignorant, Prince," Lynder replied. His quiet tone carried a sharper edge than a shout. "Half of their number is standing right in front of us. Do you truly believe the rest aren't lurking among them?"
"Well, I... At least their new leader, Delvar Palar, is not among them," he continued, though the argument already sounded hollow even to him. "Why would these ancient powers suddenly fall in line behind a new master? They wouldn't even take orders from the Sixth Witch back in the day," he added, quickly changing the subject.
"Maybe Palar provided the power they needed. Scaling this many floors might have been a bridge too far without his abilities." Lynder's expression remained grim, his eyes glued to the horizon. "The only thing that matters is that the Cult of Cuuy has returned, and someone has found a way to keep them on a leash."
Both of Roy's hands went up and fell back against his sides. "Are we done with the vague foreshadowing? Can we finally get some names for these newcomers?"
"I was coming to that!" Lynder replied. "However, you should understand that were it not for your presence, I would have summoned at least three other guildmasters to address this peril."
"You flatter me," Roy quipped sarcastically.
"I'll keep this brief for now and give you the history lesson later,"
Lynder began as he lifted his arm. From either excitement or fear, the finger Lynder raised was trembling, moving slowly and deliberately across the devastation spread before them. "That is Belbound. That is Azzemude. That is the Sixth Witch. They a—"
Before Lynder could finish, a single figure detached from the distant group, traversing the vast field with a velocity that reached Roy and the others in mere heartbeats. Upon arrival, the figure decelerated, adopting a casual, sinister gait as he strode through the grass in a direct line toward the party.
"Are you still skeptical, Lutrian?" Lynder asked, his hand finally steadying as he pointed at the partially obscured newcomer. "This... is Tommy."
Lutrian was trembling, but for Roy, the name felt like a wrong note in an otherwise dire piece of music. While the others bore names and titles that seemed plucked from the darkest verses of an ancient prophecy, inspiring legitimate dread in him, this final name failed to carry any significant gravity. Roy pressed his lips together, attempting to maintain a professional composure, yet he was utterly unsuccessful. "Tommy?" he asked, a trace of amusement coloring his voice before he could suppress it.
When Lynder turned to look at him, there was nothing forgiving in the expression. "Yes… Tommy," he replied with the weary flatness of a man whose patience for the predictable had long since evaporated. "Do not let the name fool you into expecting mercy. He is not the strongest among them, that much is true." His gaze returned to the approaching figure, still moving at that same easy, unhurried pace through the grass. "But according to every ancient record we have ever recovered, by a considerable margin…he is the most cunning."